Super Power

Is it a superpower, the ability to be surrounded with love and good things and still feel an underlying ... sadness, or melancholy?

It's neither a happy Christmas nor a blue one, but both at once.

I saw that a dead friend's just-bereaved husband was signed on to another web utility this evening. Were the feelings of worry and regret that it's his first Christmas without his partner really about him, a man I've only met once? Or am I just casting about for something to justify or make sense of a sense of loss or bereavement that was already there, that I brought in with me? And was that sense of loss about my friend? Or something else entirely?

People have been dying for millions of years. I've lost loved ones before. And yet this year it's as if I *just* woke up to mortality. And it has colored this whole season. Even the joys are in relief against it.

I think some good comes of this. I suspect I will take this and allow it to sharpen my sense of what's good in the world and how precious it is.

Right now, however, I'm all too conscious of how precious things feel that way partly because there is a deep, bad emptiness yawning under us.

I don't know whether I'm foolish for thinking about this so much, or whether I should be thinking and feeling about it even harder.

So this is Christmas.

Snow

The snow is coming down gently and beautifully today.

It was unexpected and I'm not sure I like the fact of the storm. But as a visual experience it's nice.

Routine

It's good, every now and then, to vary the routine.

I'd have to check to be sure, but I suspect I was starting vacation out of town, this time last year. Now I'm here in the office, and each day the place fills up with people a little later. The early mornings are a little quieter. It's a good thing.

Seismic, Quantum

A number of my LJ pals are feeling a need to step back from it lately.

Could just be the season. Lot of people with SAD.

I can't help but recall, though, my mother, and how after her father died ... that seemed kind of like the beginning of the end of my parents' marriage, in retrospect. Death sometimes brings a kind of focus. Figure out what's important and see if you can do better at holding onto it. Figure out what's damaged more than your power to fix it, and see if you can let it go.

I know I've lost patience with a number of things about internet interactions that I used to have very large patience for.

Some of it is definitely the season. I know my own cycles.

I've seen a lot of death this year, though. I suppose it's made me more patient about some things and very much less patient about others.

I dunno. Feels like a seismic, or quantum shift going on.

Snow Blower

I think research into more eco-friendly snowblowers would be a good thing. The new one we got makes lots of noise and I'm sure it's burning all kinds of nasty things into the air.

On the other hand, in the course of the last forty-five minutes I cleared our walkway, at least a car width in our driveway, and the sidewalk in front of not only our house (which has a long frontage) but the next two or three houses down the street. Thus enabling our legally-blind housemate, or the new mother next door, and various other people (the mailman, etc) not to kill themselves, which also has social costs. This snowfall is supposed to turn to sleet and rain by later today. It may be a solid block of ice by tomorrow. A snowblower, even one putting bad gases into the atmosphere, feels preferable to heart attacks or massive head injuries or dangerous falls of other kinds.

Yay technology.

Leading

The idea of leading by example is doubly presumptuous.

It presumes people need to learn something.

It presumes they can.

I don't know if my behavior is *consciously* guided by this principle much, but I know it's an element of many things I do, if I stop and inspect my motives clearly and dispassionately.

I need to stop it.

LiveJournal

Well. Seems LiveJournal has been acquired by a company based in Russia.

Although I am partly of eastern European/Russian descent, I'm not entirely sure that this bodes well.

So, la la, here's a post on my OTHER blog home. Which I will see about linking to from LJ.

Hm. ;-)